MOSCOW (Sputnik) – Pavel Durov, the founder and the CEO of Telegram, said Wednesday he had agreed to include the messaging app in Russia’s Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology, and Mass Media (Roskomnadzor) register but only with the use of open data.
"The registration data of Telegram’s creator company is not a secret and is available to anyone … If the regulator's wishes are really limited by this, I have no objection to using this data to register Telegram Messenger LLP in the register of organizers of information dissemination," Durov said on his VK social media page.
Pavel Durov, the founder of leading Russian social network VK.com, launched the messenger in 2013. Nowadays the number of its users stands at some 100 million. Durov left Russia in 2013.